Rally St. Louis is a unique crowdsourcing and crowd-funding project designed as a grassroots movement to improve and better market the region.

In mid-November the Rally St. Louis platform launched, allowing people to submit their idea. In December, the public voted for their favorite idea among the hundreds submitted.

Earlier this month, Rally St. Louis announced the five most popular ideas and today, on St. Louis Public Radio, the group is announcing the budgets for the projects.

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Rally St. Louis Interview

The projects include:

The Food Roof: A first-of-its-kind Rooftop Farm situated downtown to create a new system of providing our community with access to hyper-local, organic food.

Cotton Belt – Mississippi Mondo Intervention: Transforming the eastern facade of the Cotton Belt building on First Street between Florida and Dickson into a new St. Louis welcome sign, front lawn, interactive art installation, and unifying volunteer event for the city.

Project Blacktop: Project Blacktop creates a nonprofit organization with the goal of beautifying urban areas of St. Louis with functional outdoor basketball courts that serve as hubs for the neighborhood and host community building events.

St. Louis Pick-up Soccer: Creating a large turfed lit space centrally located in the St. Louis-area for year-round outdoor soccer use.

Beginning tomorrow budgeted ideas will remain open for crowd-funding on the Rally Saint Louis platform for 90 days. If they are not funded within that period, they will be removed from the site.

Host Don Marsh talks with Rally St. Louis co-founder Aaron Perlut, who in 2011 wrote an article for Forbes which went viral called “St. Louis Doesn’t Suck.” Perlut is a partner of Elasticity.

Marsh also talks with Joe Reagan, President and CEO of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association. He is on the Rally St. Louis operating board.

Also joining the program to talk about their idea are:

Tim Cooney, Washington University in St. Louis student and basketball player (Project Blacktop)

Based on January voting, five new ideas also reached the budgeting round, and throughout February the Rally STL Budget & Marketing Committee will work towards creating a project budget for these concepts:

Lighten Up St. Louis: a cost-sensitive initiative to improve neighborhood safety by installing sidewalk-facing pedestrian lights to the existing cobra head street lights on major thoroughfares.

Recreate Lindy Squared: develop a program to identify buildings on which to paint murals with positive messages -- beginning with recreating the "Lindy Squared" mural -- that are artistically creative and attractive and showcase St. Louis artists.

St. Louis Moving: miniaturize (via 3D printing) famous St. Louis landmarks, neighborhoods and other identifiable icons and place them in markets like New York, Boston, and Seattle as part of a guerrilla marketing and social media campaign to help spread the word that St. Lou is on the move.

Mushmaus Artist Residency: create an artist residency program in St. Louis, which offers time, ample space, and a stipend for DIY conceptual visual communicators to realize big ideas and to encourage an elevated dialogue about work completed at the mushmaus idea incubator between local in-residence artists and members of the community.

Automated Bike-Sharing Stations: Patterned after similar systems in Shanghai, Paris & Chicago, this project would create bicycle stations where residents and visitors may choose to rent and return bicycles at easily accessible intervals throughout the city.